French regional election - December 6 and 13, 2015

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Turnout?

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How powerful would panzerbabby and panzergirl be as "region presidents" or whatever? I understand the regions aren't exactly that autonomous, so they wouldn't have the capacity to do anything too nasty, right?

The Regional Presidencies basically exist to bribe construction companies with public funds and to subsidise public transport. They don't do a lot else, which is one reason why elections to them tend to be utter disasters for incumbent governments.

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Eh, its fycking dire everywhere even if more so in some places than others. Admittedly a huge part of that is there's not much incentive for Left voters to turn out given that the Left is in government, but even so...

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(although the probability of the party actually getting to run something major is new I guess)?

The Regional Presidencies are many things, major they are not.

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Sure its an error to act as though this came out of nowhere - as is always done - given that the FN has been a serious political force in France for thirty years now, but I'm not quite sure how pseudo-academic waffle helps to bring greater understanding (no one actually votes for the FN to protest against managerialism in the public sector ffs). The electoral power of the FN has its roots in French history, in much the same way as the peculiarities of the French Left and the 'mainstream' French Right do. In fact it just so happens that those peculiarities are critical to the success of the FN...

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This analysis is not "pseudo-academic", it is actually at an academic level and basically solely draws upon widely accepted academic work of renowned political scientists...

As a proud academic bigot it happens that I consider political 'science' - which is one of the last redoubts of uncritical quantitative social research, something that has been thoroughly discredited in basically all other fields (thank God) - to be pseudo-academic at best.

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It is concise, to the point and accurate. Therefore not waffle. As far as I'm concerned any attempt to explain the FN that ignores its Frenchness is a waste of time.

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This bears all the hallmarks of a theory searching for evidence rather a theory reached after examining evidence already uncovered. Elements of it might be true, but probably only by accident. Doubtless when inconvenient facts are encountered they will be ignored or translated into convenient psuedo-facts.

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Commies and Greens ran joint lists in Languedoc and Provence. Anyway, some really weird patterns, but then that's the norm in regional elections (which really are just gigantic local polls rather than true national elections).

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Yeah, Le Pen isn't going to become President.

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